from the can-bilski-cross-the-pond? dept

As we eagerly await the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruling in the
Bilski case -- which could greatly cut back on the ability of the US Patent Office to
grant software and business model patents, it looks Europe may be moving in the opposite
direction. We had earlier reported on a ruling in the UK which said that the UK Patent
Office had gone too far in tossing out a Symbian patent application because it was
software. Now, a UK appeals court has agreed with the earlier ruling, effectively
saying that Symbian can, in fact, patent software in the UK, despite earlier policies that
did not allow software patents.

The reasoning behind the ruling is a little odd, as it seems mostly based on aligning UK
patent rules with the rest of Europe's. However, that doesn't mean that the ruling
actually makes sense or does anything towards promoting innovation (and, plenty of recent
studies show quite clearly that software patents appear to do exactly the opposite). This
is definitely bad news for the software industry in the UK, which will now find more
tollbooths to deal with, and more patent thickets to pick through. Money is going to be
wasted going after legal fights, rather than on research, development and actually serving
customers.

But that doesn't seem to have much historical support. New markets often are driven initially by locked down and proprietary solutions, but openness tends to prevail in the long run. The reason many markets start out with closed and proprietary solutions is that you need a comprehensive enough solution to address the market, and it's often difficult to do that in an ad hoc manner. A proprietary solution gives control to one person or a small group of people who can easily drive the project to where it needs to be to drive adoption. However, in the long run, more open solutions then win out, because competitors realize that the real game is being a platform, which is more important than being the comprehensive supplier. And the way to become a platform is to sign up as many developers as possible, and free them to make your platform much more valuable. That's much easier to do in an open or open source environment.

This is why we're seeing this particular decision to open up Symbian, and also explains Google's open approach with its Android offering. It also explains why Apple's iPhone, which was totally closed at the beginning, has been slowly opening up to try to combat the rise of more open competitors.

Finally, this move by Nokia is a recognition of the economics of infinite goods. Just as IBM helped massively boost its services business by betting big on Linux, Nokia recognizes that freeing up Symbian helps turn it into a services company as well. Freeing up that infinite good (the software) helps generate more demand for the scarce "services" provided by the company. There may be some stumbles along the way, but on the whole this is exactly the type of bet the company needs to be making. And, at the same time, it shows that there's little to fear concerning a future world of "closed" systems a la the iPhone. Every such closed system is merely an opportunity and an invitation for competitors to become more open.